 Hello, and welcome to this CUBE conversation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here with a great guest, JT Gear CEO and founder of ANOPS Hot Startup. JT, welcome to this CUBE conversation. Hey, thanks John, thanks for having me. It sounds like we know each other. We used to run into each other at meetups. So yeah, good to be here. It's so, it's fun to talk to you because I know you've been scratching the DevOps itch from the beginning. Before DevOps was DevOps, before infrastructure of code was infrastructure as code. All that's played out. So it's really a great ride. I know you had a good time doing it. A lot of action though, if you look at DevOps, it's kind of like this new, I won't say DevOps 2.0 because it kind of cliche, but you start to see the maturation of companies besides the early adopters and the people who are hardcore adopting. And they realize, this is amazing. And then they replatform in the cloud and they go, great, let's do more. And next thing you know, they have an operations issue and they got to really kind of stabilize. And then also not break anything. So this is kind of the wheelhouse of what you guys are doing. NOps reminds me of no ops, no operations. No, you know, we don't want to have a lot of extra stuff. This is a big thing. Take a minute to explain the company, what you guys stand for and what you're all about. Yeah, so, you know, our main focus is more on the operation side, right? So, you know, the reason why you moved to cloud or the reason why you, you know, have DevOps practices, you want to go fast. But, you know, when you're building cloud infrastructure, you have to make trade-offs, right? You have to, in maybe some environment, maybe you have to optimize for SLA and maybe another workload, you have to optimize for, you know, maybe costs, right? So what we're on a mission to do is to make sure that companies are able to make the right trade-offs, right? We help companies to make sure all their workload, every single resource in the cloud is aligned with the business needs, you know? So we do a lot of cool things by, you know, bringing accountability, mapping, workloads to different teams. But yeah, the end goal is, can we make sure that every single resource on AWS is aligned with the business needs? Yeah, and they're also adding stuff, every reinvent, a zillion more services get announced. So a lot of stuff going on. I got to ask you while I got you here. What is the definition of cloud ops these days from your standpoint? And why is it important? A lot of folks are looking at this and they want to have stable operations. They love the cloud, really can't deny the cloud value at all. But cloud ops has become a big topic. What is cloud ops and why is it important? Right. I think first of all, like you just mentioned, like Amazon keeps on launching more services, right? It's over 200. So the environment is very complex, right? And then complexity within the services is pretty, you really need to be the main expert to, for example, know everything about Google. So, you know, operation to us is, let's say if you find a critical issue, let's say you want to, you know, enable multi-AZ on your RDS, for example. And it's critical because, you know, you're running a high availability workload on AWS. How do you follow up on that, right? To us, operation is, how do you build a cloud backlog? How do you prioritize? How do you come together as a team to actually remediate those issues? No one is tackling that job, right? Everyone's surface is like, here's a thousand things that are wrong with your environment. No one is focused on like, how do you go from these issues to prioritization, to backlog, to actually coming together as a team, you know, and fixing some of those issues? That's what operation means to us. I know, it's totally hard because sometimes you don't even know what's going on. I got to ask you, why is it harder now? Why are people, I mean, I get the impression that people like look in the other way, but the good, the problem kind of goes away. What are the challenges? What's the big blocker from getting at the root cause or trying to solve these problems? What's the big thing that's holding people back? Yeah, I mean, when I first got into, you know, IT, you know, I was working in data center and every time we needed a server, you know, we had to ask for approvals, right? And you finally got a server. But nowadays, you know, anyone could provision resources and normally you have different people within the teams provisioning resources and you can have hundreds of different teams, right? Who are provisioning resources? So the complexity and the speed that we are, you know, provisioning resources across multiple people, if it just continues to go higher and higher. So that's why, you know, on the surface, it might look that, hey, this, you know, maybe the biggest instance is, you know, aligned with the business need, you know, looking at the changes, it's hard to know are those aligned with the business need or not, right? So that's where the complexity comes in, right? So a question I get a lot from people when we talk about DevOps and CloudOps or Cloud Management or whatever kind of buzzwords out there, it kind of comes down to CloudOps and Cloud Management. It seems to be the category people focus on. How is CloudOps different than say the traditional Cloud Management? And what impact does it have for customers and why should they care and what do they need in Ops? Right, so one of the things we do and we do think that CloudOperation is sort of an evolution from Cloud Management. We make sure that every single resource first, first of all belongs in a workload. So, and workload could be a group of microservices and then every single workload has owners, like defined owners who are responsible for making sure they manage budget, they're responsible for security. That normally doesn't exist, right? Cloud is this like black box, you know, where multiple people are provisioning resources, you know, everyone tries to sort of build sort of a structure to kind of see like what are these resources for? What are these resources for? As part of on-boarding to Ops, what we do, we actually, you know, analyze all your metadata, we create like five, six workloads. And then we say, here's a bucket where this is totally unassigned, right? And then we actually walk them through assigning different roles and also we walk them through to kind of look under this unallocated resources and assign resources for those as well. So once you're done, every single resource has clear definition, right? Is this a compliant, you know, HIPAA workload? What are the runbooks? What is this for, John? I don't know if you heard that before. Sometimes there are workloads running in cloud people don't even know who's the owner, right? So after you're done with AdOps and after you're managing AdOps, you know, managing your workload on AdOps, you have full visibility and clear understanding of what are the purpose of these workloads? I see it not in your head. It's funny you mentioned the workloads being kind of either not knowing the owners, but also we see people with the workloads, sometimes it's like throwing a switch and leaving the hose on the water on. And next thing you know, they get the bill, they're like, oh my God, what happened? Why did I leave, what is this? So there's a lot of things that you could miss. This brings up the point you just said, and what you said earlier, aligning resources across the cloud and having accountability. And then you mentioned at the top of this interview that aligning with the business needs. I find that fascinating. So I would like to take a minute to explain that because it sounds really hard. I get how you can align the resources and do some things, identify what's going on, accountability, kind of map that, that's good tech. How does that, how do you get that to the alignment on the business side? Yeah, I mean, we start by, first of all, like I said, you know, we use machine learning to create these workloads. And then we ask basic questions about the workload, you know, what is this workload for? Do you need to meet with any kind of compliances for this workload? Yeah, what is your SLA for this workload? You know, depending on that, we make recommendations. So we kind of ask those questions and we also welcome do where they create roles. Like we ask like who's responsible for creating budgets or managing security for this workload. And guess what? Also the, you know, the bucket where resources are unallocated for, we ask for, you know, owners for that as well. Like in this bucket, who's the owner for, who's going to monitor the budget and things like that. So, you know, we ask, you know, we start by just asking the question, having teams complete that sort of information and also, you know, writing a little bit more information on how this aligns with the business needs, you know? Talk about the complexity side of it. I love that conversation around the number of services. You said 200 services. I mean, depending on how you count, what you call services in the thousands, there's so many different things, knobs to turn on Amazon and web services. So why are people focused on the complexity and the partnering side? Because, you know, it's the clouds of the API based system. So you're dealing with a lot of different diverse resources. So you have complexity and diversity. Can you talk me through how that works? Because that's, that seems to be a tough beast to tame the difference between the complexity of services and also working with other people. Yeah, for sure. Like this is normal to have, you know, maybe thousands of Lambda functions in your application. We were working with a customer where within last month, there were nine million containers that launched and got terminated, right? They're pretty much leveraging auto-steering and things like that. So these environments are like very complex. You know, there's a lot of moving pieces, even, you know, depending on the type of services they're using. So again, what we do, you know, when we look at tags, we look at other variables like environments and we look at who's provisioning those resources and we try to group them together. And that way there's accountability. You know, if the cost goes up for one workload, we're able to show that team like, hey, your cost is going up. And also we can show an unallocated bucket that, hey, within last week, your cost is, you know, $4,000 higher in an unallocated bucket. What would you like to move these resources to? This is like an ongoing game, you know? You know, JT, I was talking with my friend, Jerry Chen, who's at Greylock Partners in the VC, he's been on theCUBE many times. A couple of years ago, we were talking about how you can build a business within the cloud in the shadows of the clouds, what he called it. But I called it more the enabling side and that's happened now. You're seeing the massive growth. I'm also talking to some CXOs, CIOs or CISOs and they're like trying to figure out which companies that are evolving and growing to buy from, to get the technology. And they always say to me, John, I'm looking for game changing kind of impact. I'm looking for obviously efficiency and, you know, enablement, you know, the classic kind of criteria. So how would you guys position yourselves to those buyers out there that might want to look at you guys as a solution and ops? What game changing aspect of what you do is out there? How would you talk to that CIO or CISO or buyer out in the enterprise and the ISPs or NSPs? What would you say to them? Yeah, I think the biggest, the advantage, and I think right now it's a necessity that you hear these stories where, you know, people, provision resources, they don't even know which project is it for, you know, it's just very hard to govern the cloud environment, right? I believe we're the only tool where you want to compromise on the speed, right? The whole reason you're in cloud because you want to innovate, you want to move faster, no one wants to throttle that, right? But I think what's important, you need to make sure everything is aligned with the business value and we allow people to do that. You know, we can go fast at the same time, you can have some sort of guardrails so they're a proper ownership, there's accountability, people are collaborating and people are also right sizing, terminating resources they're not using, it's like, you know, I think if companies are looking for a tool that's going to drive better accountability on how people build and collaborate on cloud, I think we'll find the best solution. So people are evolving with the cloud and you mentioned terminating of services, that's a huge deal in cloud native, things are being spun up and turned off all the time. So you need to have good log, you have a good visibility, observability is one of the hottest buzzwords out there, we see resilient companies saying, hey, we're observability, which is to me is just monitoring stuff, making sure you're tracking everything. So when you have all this and you start to operationalize this next gen, next level cloud scale, cost optimization and visibility is huge. What is the secret sauce that you guys offer because the change management is a big one too, teams are changing too, cost, team, accountability, all this is kind of, it's not just speeds and feeds, it's kind of the intersection of both. What's your take on that reaction to that? Yeah, I think it's the Delta, right? So change management, what you're really looking for is not like a fire hose, right? You're looking for what changed, what the root cause, who did it, what happened, right? Because it's totally normal for someone to provision maybe a thousand or even a million containers. But how many of those got shut down? What is the Delta? And if there is an anomaly, what is the root cause, right? And how we fix it. So the way we approach change management is change management is a lot different. We really get to the root cause analysis and we really help companies to really show what changed and how they can take action to immediate if there were issues. I want to put a little plug in for you guys. I noticed you guys have a really strong net promoter score and you have happy customers also get partners, a lot of enablement there. You kind of got a lot of things going on. Explain what you guys are all about. How did you get here? What's the day in the life of a customer that you're serving? Why the score so high? Take us through a use case of someone getting that value. Yeah. So I come from like a consulting background, John. So I was migrating companies through AWS when EC2 was in beta. And then I founded a consulting company over a hundred employees really successful AWS premier partner called nClouds. And so NOS was born there because it was born out of consulting company. There are a lot of other partners who are leveraging the tool to help their customers. And it goes back to our point earlier, John, like Amazon has two under services, right? We are noticing customers are open to work with partners and with different partners to really help them to make sure they're making the right decisions when they're building on cloud. So a lot of the partners, a lot of the consulting companies are leveraging NOps to deliver value to their customers. As far as how we actually operate, we pay attention to what customers are looking for, what are the next sort of challenges customers are facing in a cloud environment. We're like super obsessed. We're trying to figure out, how do we make sure every single resource is aligned with the business value without slowing companies down? So that really drives us, we're constantly working with customers to stay true to our mission. And that's the ethos of DevOps, moving fast, the old quote Mark Zuckerberg used to have, move fast, break stuff. And then he revised it to move fast and make it stable, which is essentially an operational thing, right? So you're starting to see that maturity. I noticed that you guys also have a really cool pricing model, very easy to get in and you have a high end too. So talk us through about how to engage with you guys, how do people get involved? Just click and just jump in. They're buying software, they're buying services. Take a minute to explain how people can work with you. Yeah, it's just as simple as just signing up on our site, our pricing is tier model. And once you sign up, if you do need help with remediating high-risk issues, we can bring in partners. We have a strong partner ecosystem. We could definitely help you to introduce to like partners, but it's as simple as just signing up and just taking it out for a spin, I guess. JT, great chatting with you. You've been there from early days of DevOps, born in the field, getting close to the customers. And you mentioned EC2 and Beta, they just celebrate their 15th birthday. And I remember one of my startups that didn't actually get off the blocks, they didn't even have custom domains at that time. It was still the long member of the long URL. Everything was ephemeral, right? Like when you restart server, everything will go away. That's a cool time. And I just remember saying to myself, man, every entrepreneur is going to use this service. Who would ever go out and buy and host a server? So, you were there from the beginning and it's been great to see the success. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Oh, thanks, John. Okay, JT, thanks so much. This is a CUBE conversation here in Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching.